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Father Paul Hedman admits to tearing up before and during his ordination Mass. Afterward, it seemed he couldn’t smile broadly enough. “I can’t put my reaction into words,” he said. The closest was “wow.”

Deacon Austin Barnes, 26, vividly remembers his first time as an altar server, as a fourth grader at Holy Trinity in South St. Paul. For one, none of the other servers showed up. And a visiting priest was saying Mass.

On a retreat in Italy during his junior year in college, Deacon Clayton Forner was sitting in a chapel with an assignment: meditate on the Nativity. He was trying to place himself in the scene, imagining what he would see, smell, hear. And as prayed, he found himself viewing the scene through the eyes of Joseph — witnessing Jesus’ birth, wiping the infant with a towel and gazing upon him.

What began as a chance to meet new people on a mission trip in the Andes of Peru became an opportunity for God to reach more directly into Deacon Cesar Valencia Martinez’s life, calling him to the priesthood.

The Catholic Spirit invited Catholics in various leadership positions throughout the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to share advice for the class of 2020. The following is a selection of those responses.

To honor graduating high school seniors in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, The Catholic Spirit asked three Catholic high schools — Academy of Holy Angels in Richfield, DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis and Providence Academy in Plymouth — to nominate students for the following profiles.

At Trinity Heights Queen of Peace Shrine, a 30-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of Mary, Queen of Peace, welcomes 80,000 visitors a year with an outstretched hand. With the other, she points across the shrine’s statues and gardens to the source of peace — a slightly taller statue of Jesus revealing his Sacred Heart.

Dial back to the fall of 1979. A new pope, John Paul II, set out to embark on a nine-day apostolic journey to the United States that included a special visit to Des Moines, Iowa, only 230 miles from the Twin Cities.